“This is the perfect deal at the right time,” said Kottmann in a statement.

“Together, we will create a global leader in specialty chemicals with a combined balance sheet providing substantial financial strength and flexibility,” Peter Huntsman said in a prepared statement.

Huntsman has suggested in recent interviews that the company was considering such deals as a way to grow.

“We are probably more open to the idea of a potential merger than we would have been in the past,” Huntsman said in a previous interview. “This company is poised to expand, and I like to think mergers is one of those areas.”

Huntsman has a market capitalization value of $6.4 billion versus Clariant’s value of just more than $7 billion.

Huntsman is in the process of spinning off part of its company, primarily its pigments business, into a separate publicly traded entity, called Venator Materials Corp. The name comes from the Latin word for hunting to maintain the Huntsman family legacy.

Peter Huntsman has said that any mergers or acquisitions didn’t necessarily have to wait for the Venator deal to finalize.

Venator will primarily house its division that makes titanium dioxide, a chemical used to make pigments for paints, food coloring and other products.

The legacy Huntsman company, at the same time, has recently expanded plants in both Port Neches and Conroe to make more proprietary chemicals that go into laundry detergents, cosmetics, and other consumer goods.

After Huntsman went public in 2005, Peter Huntsman moved the family business from Utah, where it was founded by his father, Jon Sr., to The Woodlands, where it would be closer to its plants, customers and supplies of natural gas that provide the feedstock for petrochemicals.

The company hit it big more than more than 40 years ago making the cheap, plastic “clamshell” containers for McDonald’s Big Mac burgers, but now focuses more on the specialty chemicals, plastics, foams and composite materials that go into such things as Boeing airplanes, BMW cars and Nike shoes. Huntsman began the switch from common base chemicals to specialty products a decade ago.